13.3. About OSWatcher Black Box

13.3. About OSWatcher Black Box
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13.3.1. Installing OSWbb
13.3.2. Running OSWbb

Oracle OSWatcher Black Box (OSWbb) collects and archives operating system and network metrics that you can use to diagnose performance issues. OSWbb operates as a set of background processes on the server and gathers data on a regular basis, invoking such Unix utilities as vmstat, netstat, iostat, and top.

From release v4.0.0, you can use the OSWbba analyzer to provide information on system slowdowns, system hangs and other performance problems, and also to graph data collected from iostat, netstat, and vmstat. OSWbba requires that you have installed Java version 1.4.2 or higher on your system. You can use yum to install Java, or you can download a Java RPM for Linux from http://www.java.com.

OSWbb is particularly useful for Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters) and Oracle Grid Infrastructure configurations. The RAC-DDT (Diagnostic Data Tool) script file includes OSWbb, but does not install it by default.

13.3.1. Installing OSWbb

To install OSWbb:

Log on to My Oracle Support (MOS) at http://support.oracle.com.
Download the file oswbb601.tar, which is available at https://support.oracle.com/epmos/main/downloadattachmentprocessor?attachid=301137.1:OSW_file.
Copy the file to the directory where you want to install OSWbb, and run the following command:
```
# tar xvf oswbb601.tar
```
Extracting the tar file creates a directory named oswbb, which contains all the directories and files that are associated with OSWbb, including the startOSWbb.sh script.
If the ksh package is not already installed on your system, use yum to install it.
```
# yum install ksh
```
Create a symbolic link from /usr/bin/ksh to /bin/ksh.
```
# ln –s /bin/ksh /usr/bin/ksh
```
This link is required because the OSWbb scripts expect to find ksh in /usr/bin.
To enable the collection of iostat information for NFS volumes, edit the OSWatcher.sh script in the oswbb directory, and set the value of nfs_collect to 1:
```
nfs_collect=1
```
Note
This feature is available from release v5.1.

13.3.2. Running OSWbb

To start OSWbb, run the startOSWbb.sh script from the oswbb directory.

# ./startOSWbb.sh [frequency duration]

To stop OSWbb prematurely, run the stopOSWbb.sh script from the oswbb directory.

# ./stopOSWbb.sh

OSWbb collects data in the following directories under the oswbb/archive directory:

Directory	Description
`oswiostat`	Contains output from the iostat utility.
`oswmeminfo`	Contains a listing of the contents of `/proc/meminfo`.
`oswmpstat`	Contains output from the mpstat utility.
`oswnetstat`	Contains output from the netstat utility.
`oswprvtnet`	If you have enable private network tracing for RAC, contains information about the status of the private networks.
`oswps`	Contains output from the ps utility.
`oswslabinfo`	Contains a listing of the contents of `/proc/slabinfo`.
`oswtop`	Contains output from the top utility.
`oswvmstat`	Contains output from the vmstat utility.

OSWbb stores data in hourly archive files named system_name_utility_name_timestamp.dat, and each entry in a file is preceded by the characters *** and a timestamp.

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